Google is launching this week a beta version of Google Desktop search for Linux in a sign of encouragement by the search giant for Linux on the desktop. Google Desktop allows people to search the Web while also searching the full text of all the information on their computer, including Gmail and their Web search history. Because the index is stored locally on the computer, users can access Gmail and Web history while offline.

The current Linux indexers Beagle, tracker and Google Desktop, relies on batch indexing by a running process. While this is fine for initial indexing, it is slow and the index is outdated as soon as someone creates a new file or changes an old one.

In spotlight for MacOS on the other hand the index gets automatically updated as soon as a file gets changed. If you open a Spotlight search for "Foo" and go to a terminal and type 'echo "foo" > test.txt', the search window will update to include test.txt immediately.

The same should happen with Beagle and Tracker. As an added bonus, you wouldn't have to have the indexer search through your file system so often to find updates.

The current Linux indexers Beagle, tracker and Google Desktop, relies on batch indexing by a running process. While this is fine for initial indexing, it is slow and the index is outdated as soon as someone creates a new file or changes an old one.

This is not true. At least Beagle also index changes as soon as they appear. It is informed by the inotify facility of the linux kernel about filesystem changes.